Arrowmont Craft Conversations: Jeana Eve Klein

ARROWMONT CRAFT CONVERSATIONS is a video series that highlights artists in the Arrowmont community. Our partnership with Arrowmont faculty and community members has contributed to Arrowmont’s longevity, growth as a school of arts and crafts, and our reputation as an institution that welcomes everyone. The artists who appear in this series exemplify the characteristics that represent the School — they span generations and are among the most experienced, capable, and innovative in the arts and crafts world.

Each of the artists in this series offers insights into their work and their reflections on being a part of the Arrowmont community.

Jeana Eve Klein lives in Boone, North Carolina and is an associate professor of fibers at Appalachian State University. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at the Charleston Heights Arts Center in Las Vegas, Nevada and OZ Arts in Nashville, Tennessee. She is a 2014 recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council Craft Artist Fellowship.

Jeana’s recent studio practice has coalesced around the broad theme of value: how society in general assigns value (or worthlessness) to objects, and how the art world, specifically, assigns value to works of art, craft and design. These ideas are made tangible through large mixed media quilts and tiny obsessive embroideries. The quilts draw—both visually and conceptually—on Klein’s infatuation with abandoned houses. She uses digital photography and inkjet printing to capture the reality of abandonment, superimposed with her painted imaginings of the houses’ former lives. In the embroideries, Klein analyzes the value of the artist’s hand by neurotically making (and counting) French knots, and then somehow convincing others to do her stitching for her. In her latest project begun in 2016, Jeana is considering the false sense of participation, the ineffective activism, and the echo chamber of social media via text-based works constructed of hand-cut recycled fabric. Since the onset of the pandemic, Jeana has sewn masks, exploring experimental weaving, and participated as an activist in her community.